“We wouldn’t be able to fly”

Q: Can you describe yourself for me, physically and emotionally?

A: Do you have any more specific parameters or is that…

Q: Nope. that’s… that’s it, just describe yourself.

A: Physically I am… smallish… athletic-ish… although extremely clumsy when not on the dance floor. I use a lot of hand gestures and excessively animated facial expressions. Emotionally, I am empathetic to a fault; I am able to listen to someone else’s opinion and absolutely just right now agree with that because I can see where they’re coming from even if I don’t. I feel like that defines a lot of who I am emotionally in so many ways because it leads me to be confused or extremely sure of myself or really connected or really disconnected or any of those things. I feel like that is one of the core causes I guess…

Q: Causes of…

A: For how I react in any situation, like I feel like that is one of the driving forces, the root of who I am.

Q: Tell me about the earliest memory that you can remember.

A: I don’t know about the earliest but one memory that I’ve thought about lately, just because having kids has led me to think about this, is laying in bed in the summertime, when it’s like seven, eight o’clock and it’s still sunny outside, and being just so upset that I was the one who had to go to bed and everybody else gets to stay up and I remember just bawling to the point that my mom would come into the room and be like, “Just stop crying, stop crying” and I would just be like (hyperventilating and hysterical) “I… can’t… stop…”
I remember one night, I actually got up out of bed and I snuck downstairs, and I had done that so many times, but this specific night my mom was downstairs on the couch watching Larger Than Life, it’s like an elephant who’s being trained by… that’s all I remember and I remember coming on to the couch and she was like, “you can sit here and watch this with me because I know you’re having a hard time sleeping.” So I have this memory of being so upset that I had to go to bed and I have this memory of this one time that my mom let me stay up and do this thing with her. That’s probably the earliest that’s relevant in my life right now.

Q: Tell me about something that you are proud of having done in your life.

A: Well I think that I do things daily that I am a little bit proud of. I mean one of the things that I think I’m really good at is fixing miscommunication. I feel like because I have this crazy, weird empathetic curse/blessing, I can see both sides of an issue but I can also see, if I know someone, where they may have come from versus where they meant to come from. So a lot of times I can see two people’s point of view and what they thought they said versus what they actually said because of the interactions that I’ve had with them and I’m able to kind of bring them together, just to help them kind of understand where the other person was coming from and what the other person said versus what they meant.

Q: If you could say one thing anonymously to a large group of people, what would you say?

A: (long pause)

Phrasing is the hardest part for me…

I know what I want to say but you have to give me a minute to get there…

I would say, the world is beautiful because you are you and they are them and the world would be less beautiful if you were them and they were you. If everybody thought like me, it would be super scary; and if everybody thought like you, it would be super scary. The thing I think that really brings us balance is that we have a right wing and a left wing, we have agreement and disagreement and we have opinions on each side of the fence, and if we didn’t have that we wouldn’t be able to fly… if we didn’t have the right wing and the left wing we wouldn’t be able to fly. I think that something that’s super scary about where we’re headed is that everybody wants the other person to think like them and if the other person thinks like them then we topple, y’know, or we don’t have perspective. so I think that’s the thing that I would offer because it’s going to apply to so many issues in our world today as far as personal issues, political issues, educational issues. If we would just remember that the other person’s perspective has value, then I think that, sorry to be redundant, but we could find the value in what the other person was trying to say.

Right now, today, that’s what I would say. Two years from now it may be different… but…